Is it common for soldiers to fire without aiming during war?

 Is it common for soldiers to fire without aiming during war?

I am sharing true story of A Real Hero The Soldier

Interesting how easy it is to get sunk into technical gun stuff and pros & cons about Marine life in general when the Answer is about killing human beings mostly for stupid reasons (except for defending one’s brothers in arms, but then, what are we doing there?) Killing people with families and hopes and dreams… again, on both sides. Even our own guys (whom we like to call “our boys”), after they get killed, get reduced to a few seconds on the nightly news—a last smile, or a last determined, brave look, because they ARE brave and determined and shouldn’t have to die for it…or kill for it. Aim toward the sky when you have no idea whether the person you’d hit, who may be shooting at you, deserves to die. ( I understand there was a lot of that in the Vietnam War, when guys weren’t aiming at their own lieutenants.)
(Google “Say it isn’t so Jackson” One ISIS-terrorist said in an interview for a Swedish newspaper that he didn’t know if he actually killed anyone in a firefight. “We shoot in a general direction and quite often it was dark and we couldn’t see much. But we later found dead bodies.” Thank you for your service. I work with a it who fought in Afghanistan in the Marine Corp. while the stories are real and the fear was real he enjoys talking about it (which I also think is healthy) and I enjoy listening.

It was wild that he could go on google maps and zoom in on the area his unit was patrolling and where he got into a fire fight. Y’all truly are brave and the sacrifice y’all made does not go unappreciated. It made sense to see a big jump from WWII to Vietnam. Went from 30–06 to 556, and 8 rounds per reload to 20. (Original Vietnam era M-16 mags were those straight 20 round aluminum things). WWI saw our guys using the same 30–06 round, but in the bolt action Springfield, before transitioning to the 8 rd end bloc clip of the Garland in WWII. Now the 30 round PMags are the norm (Marines anyway…don't know what the Army uses). Who knows what the next war will feature. Some sort of exotic bullet hose.

Now, Afghanistan is far more wide-open than the jungles of southeast Asia, so again, more ammo.

As an aside, my son flies Hornets, and they perform CAS for Navy & Marine TICs. Glad that crap is done with.

I also remember seeing lots of combat footage on the news when all kinds of insurgents and militias just covered behind walls only shoving their rifles above it. (not to mention Rambo like hip-fire-strafing). I figured it was only poor training and/or bad discipline.

Needless to say, this is a different class of fighters than regular troops with proper basic training. Like a Libyan rebel said: “Yesterday I was a dentist and had never held a gun in my hand. that blanks, not containing lead, would be a lot lighter than live ammo so you could carry more of them. I was also assuming the same _weapons_ that fired lethal ammo would fire the blanks, so you wouldn’t be carrying in extra _weapons_, per se. Perhaps a portable device that could produce the sound of several weapons firing would be more practical, not requiring one or more soldiers to be less than maximally lethal.

This all reminds me of an isolated fire base in Vietnam I recall hearing about where the NVA exploited American training to expend ammo rather wastefully. They’d basically fire one or two shots into the base, duck down while the Americans fired dozens of rounds back, move, and repeat the process. Over the course of a couple of days they got the Americans to consume their limited ammo at a rate of about 100x their own consumption rate. I rarely recommend the USMC, as they are indeed a special breed.

Indeed, I couldn’t get an honest recommendation as to even a branch of service or not recommending service until I actually got to talk to you for a decent enough amount of time to know your temperament, preferences in structured life, etc.

And I served from 1981 until 2009, when it just started to hurt too much putting on all of that equipment. Armor weighs in around 47 pounds, helmet being 7 pounds of it. Rifle, around 8 pounds with optic. Ammunition, another 14 pounds or so. Water, around 5 pounds. Mission specific.

In Afghanistan, He never aimed at a person. Instead,  He just shot in the same direction that everyone else was shooting.

Why? Well, whomever He was shooting at was usually so far away, that either He wouldn't be able to see them to properly aim, or if he were to take the time to properly aim, He might get hit with a bullet before He could pull the trigger.

So, what's the point then in shooting if He don't really know where he is shooting?

Suppressive fire. Shoot more bullets than the other guys, and it might keep them down long enough for them to either run out of ammo, for you to send a fire team to assault their position, for you to shoot mortars at their position, or for you to call in an air strike.

Additionally, we frequently had a sniper with us during patrols, so giving enough suppressive fire gives him enough time to get his sights on somebody. It also gives the Air Force guy we commonly had with us (JTAC) the opportunity to call really big scary planes to drop really big scary bombs.

One time we were actually pinned down in a grape field momentarily while out on patrol in a village, and the little familiar circus whistle and crackling sounds of bullets began to appear. Even saw the dust fly up in front me where they were hitting. He looked to my left and saw a young infantryman poke his head up and start aiming through his scope. He thought, "this guy is fucking nuts." And then He grabbed my balls, set up on the berm, and started firing some shots downrange too.

When, suddenly, the platoon leader started shouting for everyone to cease fire, because there was another company down range in the general direction we were shooting, also engaging with the Taliban (presumably the same fighters who were shooting at us).

So, we waited in cover, let the other guys do their thing, and eventually the fire stopped. And, that's one downside of not seeing your targets.

                (Aouthor) Me in a grape field in Moqur, 2012

IN THE FIFTYS i had several teachers who did WWII we asked one teacher what it was like to kill and he said that he had no idea never kept his head up long enough to find out. Once on a beach in the pacific somewhere a sniper fired a round 300 rifles shot at am palm tree the Japanese often used these trees for cover no body fell out so no one ever knew if he was killed or if he was ever in the tree in the first place when you emptied your clip you dived in the nearest cover and stayed there until some Sargent came by if he can stand up that long it must be safe. i spent 1962 in just outside the DMZ never shot at but nearly froze to death S.Korea is an experience for a S.CAL boy. There’s aiming involved, as in “pointing the weapon as close as possible to where the shots are continuing to come from”. It’s hard when you’re issued a red dot, and a bunch of Taliban fighters are shooting at you from hundreds of meters away. Some of the guys with longer range optics could give more accurate fire.

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